Digital Sextant

by Bill Kelter & Wayne Shellabarger

I added this book to my Amazon wishlist after it got a very positive review on BoingBoing, and it turned up in my birthday gift pile.  Veeps provides a short, pithy bio of each Veep, along with relevant facts about the administration he worked for and why he’s worth remembering.  The illustrations are funny and there are lots of great quotes, often from the Veeps themselves about why they don’t want the office.  My favorite is the one from William Almon Wheeler on the cover, “I regret that I was nominated.  You know I did not want the place.”

It’s a nice little book, perfect for reading a little bit at a time.  Kelter and Shellabarger do a great job filling in little bits of history and outlining why each Veep was good or stinky.  Most were empty suits (by nature or by circumstance), but there were a few very competent men whose Presidents actually gave them something to do.

Some tidbits:

• John C. Calhoun (vp to JQ Adams & Andrew Jackson) saw his political career spiral out of control over the social infighting of the Washington ladies circles.  Jackson’s choice for Secretary of War, John Eaton, had an affair with a married barmaid over which her husband killed himself.  Eaton then married the woman, nicknamed “Pothouse Peggy” and shunned by the snooty Washington wives.  When Jackson appealed to Calhoun to get his wife to be nice to Eaton’s new bride, Calhoun refused (or claimed little power in swaying her).  Jackson didn’t forgive him.
• Martin Van Buren was quite an asshole in his own right, but his Veep, Richard Mentor Johnson, takes the cake, IMO.  Johnson, like many slave-owning men of the era, took advantage of his female slaves.  But to the horror of society elites, Johnson took one of them into his house to live as his common-law wife, bearing their children and running the household.  Johnson seems pretty progressive until you learn that after his wife died, he brought another woman into the house to replace her.  She ran away with her husband, one of Johnson’s other slaves.  When they were caught, Johnson sold her out of spite and then took her sister into his house instead.
• U.S. Grant’s Veep was Schuyler Colfax, a particularly corrupt man who had the nickname “Schuyler the Smiler.”
• Henry Agard Wallace, FDR’s second Veep, who gave up the office only eight months before FDR died, was a new-age nutcase who believed in the Masons and thought the Russian communists weren’t all that bad.  The Washington elite were terrified that FDR would die and leave Wallace in charge.
• I have only the casual GenXer’s view of Watergate, it being before my time and never one of my topics of reading (though I did read Haldeman’s memoir), so I didn’t really know much about Spirow Agnew, except that he was one of Nixon’s scapegoats.  Turns out he was also a corrupt scuzzo.  Who’da thunk?

An enjoyable little book.  Nothing amazing, but not bad either.